Delivering best care

Delivering best care, ensuring that our patients
receive excellent quality treatment at the appropriate time and
setting, and are discharged from hospital at an appropriate time
when they are well enough, is one of our key objectives.

We aim to deliver the best evidence-based care we can with care
and compassion, benchmark our practice in order to learn, and
listen to what our patents tell us, involving them in their care
and how we develop services in the future.

We have a quality
strategy that sets out our ambition for improving the quality
of services we deliver over the next four years. Our strategy is
structured around four key themes that are central to quality:

Ensuring timely access to services

Delivering safe and reliable care

Improving patient and staff experience

Improving outcomes and reducing mortality.

In addition we agree a set of annual quality objectives
each year and assess our progress against these, and the national
standards, in our
annual quality report.

As part of our ongoing work to ensure we deliver excellent care,
we have signed up to the national campaign Sign up to
Safety and continually work to introduce improved services for
patients.

Recent examples include:

In September 2015 we launched a new transport service for
critically ill children in the South West of England and South
Wales. The new combined service called WATCh - Wales and West Acute
Transport for Children - retrieves children who are critically ill
or injured from district general hospitals without paediatric
intensive care facilities. The service is run by Bristol Royal
Hospital for Children (BRCH), and is a collaboration between the
paediatric transport teams from BRCH and the Noah's Ark Children's
Hospital for Wales (CHfW). The regional service concentrates
expertise and serves as a single point of contact for immediate
advice, information on an appropriate intensive care bed and access
to a specialist clinical team.

UH Bristol successfully led a collaborative bid on behalf of 17
organisations to establish a genomics medicine centre in the west
of England. NHS providers in Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham and
Gloucester, the universities of Bristol and the West of England,
the Academic Health Science Network, commissioners and patient
organisations established the partnership to develop genomics
medicine to help patients who have a rare disease or cancer. This
is a new frontier in medical care, as genomics has the potential to
develop a more tailored individualised approach to patient care and
future patients in the West of England will benefit from these
advancements.

We have been selected by NHS England to evaluate two innovative
new treatments. The Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre (BHOC)
is one of 17 centres nationwide to participate in NHS England's
commissioning through evaluation of stereotactic ablative body
radiotherapy (SABR). This is a modern, more precise delivery
technique for radiotherapy, which delivers high doses of radiation
while causing less damage to surrounding healthy tissue than
conventional radiotherapy. Similarly the Bristol Heart Institute
(BHI) was selected as an evaluation centre to offer an innovative
new treatment for people with severe cardiac problems. The
MitraClip procedure benefits patients who suffer from
breathlessness and tiredness who have a leak in their mitral valve,
which helps control blood flow through the heart. The procedure
enables cardiologists and surgeons to repair the leak through
keyhole surgery.